Paper Republic – Chinese Literature in Translation

Tang Danhong: Chairman Mao is Dead!

This short memoir, which Tang posted to her blog “Moments of Samsara,” captures the confusion of childhood, the personal tragedy brought on by political and natural disasters, and the first inkling of the author’s emerging moral compass. She shows us her conception of the world on the eve of Mao Zedong’s death on September 9, 1976, when she was in fourth grade, and how that worldview underwent its own seismic shift when the “Great Helmsman” left. The Cultural Revolution had worn on for a decade and had shaped Tang, but not quite in the way the Communist Party intended.